Organizations utilize a variety of methods to safeguard confidential information such as payment instrument data. Among these are encryption of data and the use of tokens to represent confidential information. However, current methods have difficulties scaling to high availability systems with large amounts of encrypted data. Rotating encryption keys for encrypted data can require either taking a system offline or duplicating data and taking the duplicate system offline while rotation occurs. With large amounts of data in a high availability environment, taking the system offline or utilizing duplicate hardware may not be viable. Furthermore, cryptographic operations taking place on a server may be vulnerable to compromise, rendering confidential information accessible.
Given the rapid increase in online commerce, online organizations demand hardened and more rapid processing of encryption functions including encryption key rotation.